


The Marvelous Strider-Lalonde Traveling Circus

by isellys



Series: Magic, the Digital Age, and Sicknasty Kids [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Magic, Cousin Incest, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 18:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3392573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isellys/pseuds/isellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life and times of D. Strider and R. Lalonde, sometimes-fugitives. </p><p>This is not a story about the history of the Wizarding War. This is a definitive guide to falling in with Rose Lalonde, who started out as Dave Strider's terrible fated rival. What she ends up as depends on whom you're asking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Most Sane and Sunly

_People change_ was something Dave Strider had learned at an early age. He was no exception. For example, when he was five, the most magical thing that he had ever known was the washing machine, which would chomp up Bro’s muddy, rain-soaked clothes and spit them out as clean wet shirts and trousers. Then Bro had explained to him, no, that’s technology, son, and magic joined Santa on the pile of stupid things Dave didn’t believe in.

Then he had turned eleven, and then an owl had delivered a letter to his house. It turned out that Bro refused to introduce Dave to the rest of the family not only because they were all ‘mega horse dicks so fucking vile they’d kill a bestiality porn star’ (obviously not the sort of thing most eleven-year-olds heard from their legal guardians), but also because they farted magic like unicorns farted rainbows. And then Bro had backpedalled saying, shit, unicorns don’t fart rainbows. But they’re real, bro.

They started going to family reunions.

Dave _hated_ Bro’s family. They were the eternal mega horse dicks, and Bro had been too right about them.

Most of them barely wanted to look at Dave, and then the some that did were split into two camps: one half would interact with him with pure undisguised contempt, and the other half was so incredibly passive-aggressive Dave wondered whether they were capable of maintaining sincere relationships outside of their dysfunctional little tree. The dislike was thick and mutual.

The sole exception was Rose Lalonde, the daughter of Bro’s tall, silk-clad cousin.

She was a Slytherin, and Dave’s enemy by default. This was a thing whispered to him by the Quidditch captain within two days of setting foot in Hogwarts. But as far as terrible fated rivals went, Rose was not so bad.

Dave had been twelve and thoroughly sick of Christmas when he’d put newt eyeballs and lizard toes in every single mug of Butterbeer in the Lalonde Manor. He did it not because he thought it was funny; amusement faded into the ghost a distant lighthouse the moment Dave stepped into the Manor. The thought of his relatives clambering all over each other to reach the bathroom so they could throw up reptile parts filled Dave with a sense of grim satisfaction. Alas, he was found out.

One of his aunts then created a prison for him in the back gardens, a mess of vines and thorny bush, and made him sit in it for the rest of the night. He had been cold and miserable and she’d poured her drink through a gap between the tangled branches. Her laughter echoed far into the night. She took his wand, too.

He sat back and closed his eyes.

The gardens were plants sculpted in labyrinths; Dave didn’t venture in it much, but he’d heard rumors about it in Hogwarts. The Lalonde gardens were full of magical booby traps; they kept Acromantulas deep inside them; there was a sphinx stolen from Egypt. If these animals had really existed there, they made no sound. They left Dave alone, and time stretched on.

When Bro sometimes came home really late at night Dave would often stare at the second hand of the clock and watch it twitch round the face, losing himself in its rhythm until a familiar knock on the door came to break it. Over the years that distraction had grown to become more complex, evolved into music, but even that had served as a form of escapism. Dave sat in the vacuum and unraveled the beats to their basest form.

He counted the seconds.

His head voice was in the middle of enunciating seven-hundred-eighty-four when the knock came. It was delicate, and it barely traveled through the barbs. Some of the branches parted to reveal a pale eye.

“Let it never be said that the Lalonde Manor doesn’t harbor a single person with a sense of humor,” said a familiar voice. She was in his Defense Against the Dark Arts class. They had never really noticed each other before. _That’s Lalonde, see, she’s a dark witch—I heard it from a seventh year. Stay away from her, Strider, I know you’re related but you don’t want to involve yourself with Death Eaters, do you?_

“Fuck yeah,” he said hoarsely. “A knight in snakeskin armor.”

The eye disappeared; in its place came the tip of his wand, which pushed through the gap and dropped in front of him.

“I’m going to teach you how to burn these things down,” she said, a bit louder now. “Pay attention.”

He did.

Twenty minutes later they sat on his prison’s ashes together, smiling smugly. Bars of iron rose above them and came together, forming a birdcage, trapping them within even as the rain fell through the gaps and soaked them to the bone. Rose’s mother had come close to getting her out by pleading with her relatives and outright blackmail, but Rose had said, “No need, mother,” and that was that.

“Whatever makes you happy, dear,” replied the woman with a fluttering sigh. Then she’d strolled back through the house, every inch of her dry.

At that moment Dave had looked at Rose and she had looked back. They might have grinned, but they weren’t most children. Rain clung on his shades, obscuring his vision. Her image was blurry through them, silver like a reflection on candlesticks, the ghost of solemnity waiting to reveal itself from under the spell of childhood. He suspected he looked much the same. There they sat, cold and shivering, for most of the night. Bro and Rose’s mother came to bring them home, later.

This would be the first of many joint victories.

* * *

It should be noted that when Order of Skaia pioneer Jade English (neé Peixes) had been forty, Dave and Rose had only come into the world, squealing in defiance. It was a much milder form of the havoc they’d wreck for the rest of their lives. Who knows if Harley heard her later-friends then, by some miraculous telephone-thread of fate? They were loud enough, certainly, and she had excellent hearing.

The funny thing was that Dave and Rose had both been incredibly noisy babies. From the time Dave’s mother gave birth to him to the moment she handed him to Bro and left without another word, he did not stop crying except to feed. Rose, too, until her mother had sang, ‘Shut It, Hellspawn’, and she was so unnerved by the resulting silence that she spent the rest of Rose’s life trying to get her to raise her voice again. No such luck.

They were both very quiet, from then on.

In Hogwarts they clanked through without as much adolescent noise as most of their schoolmates. Dave saw Muggleborns (never mudbloods; Bro had never been an advocate for Muggles but he would love them just to spite his family) hoisted up to the ceiling by their ankles. He didn’t take their attackers on; he did many dumb things, but he wouldn’t do all of them.

“I think it’s all rather juvenile,” Rose said, as she continued to make a potion not inside any of the books they had. She was pureblooded, and so she evaded prejudice.

After that they met by the lake, under a tree. It was a secluded and absurdly well-hidden spot, near impossible to see from almost every angle. Rose was already there when he trudged towards the bank. The dusk was thick and shadow-soaked, and it was getting harder to see because of his shades, but he could make out the faint outline of a lumpy sack by her side. It was surprisingly inelegant, for her.

She inclined her head towards it, and Dave peeked inside.

“ _Lumos._ ”      

The inside of the sack gleamed blue and red and gold from its depths, a dozen different crests carved into precious stones and metal; family heirlooms entrusted by fathers and mothers to children with the promise that someday they would be this powerful; ancient spells written in blood, sealed with dark and forbidden metals, hung on thick chains of oath-bound history.

“Berell, Beaumont, Shedlock,” he read aloud. Rose shared with them her common room. “You really reckon that they haven’t cloaked these things in spells strong enough to keep out a goblin and his bastard witch child?”

“It crossed my mind,” she said, and she took out her Potions experiment from the folds of the cloak. Uncorking it released a cloud of heady smoke that Dave couldn’t see but smelled all too well. He coughed as quietly as it could. The air burned inside his nostrils and his throat.

“Oh, fuck, really, Lalonde. That was what Operation Brew Tar in Class and Earn Your Partner Minus Fifty House Points was for?” He’d lost more house points then Berell and Delacroix had for locking first-years in the bathroom and then flooding it with treacle. The serenity in Rose’s eyes when Professor Droog had renounced what they’d cooked up as ‘the work of two blithering idiots who haven’t half a brain to share’ was like that of a holy man’s. “I should’ve known. Killing two birds with one stone, isn’t it, making me lose points and doing… all this. Whatever you’re doing. Please don’t tell me you’re going to become the figurehead for the Purebloods for Muggleborn Equality Club; if you die no one would write my essays.”

“Now, Dave, these belonged to dear friends of my mother. I assure you that I am doing this out of spite. My motives are entirely personal and have nothing to do with the greater good.” She held out the bottle in her hand to him. “Do the honors?”

He took it from her and poured the contents in. The sack belched and fluid leaked out from its sides, glowing a sickly green. The light brushed Rose’s face with a soft eeriness; she watched the protective spells die and did not smile.

Then she set fire to the mess.

It roared up like dragonbreath. Dave’s first instinct was to fling it far away, into the lake, where it plunged in with a mighty splash. They scuttled close to the water like awed children. The tongues of flame seared emerald trails over liquid shadow. The water’s surface moved and turned it into a glowing green smear, shrinking and shrinking for what seemed like forever. Then something black and wavy closed over it, and another, and another, until the fire suffocated and died.

“Well, now that we’ve set fire to a couple of dickheads’ jewelry, all of which happen to be older than our great-grandmother’s flabby arse, by the way, do you feel any better? That could’ve fetched a lot of galleons, Rose. I could’ve bought myself a vibrating broomstick.”

“Yes, I imagine that’s something you’d want to have with you during your lonely nights,” she said. “Come on, we can’t miss dinner.”

He followed her, and as they rustled through the dark, his mind came up with something vivid and needle-sharp: a fourth-year Ravenclaw slammed into the floor, as several purebloods stood by and watched, laughed, made wisecracks. Dave had fought the urge to throw a curse in their direction. He’d turned away as quick as he could.

But he had seen this frozen in his peripheral vision: Rose, standing still, her expression like one of a scientist observing a failed experiment; a spark of malevolent black curling slowly around the length of her wand.

* * *

Vantas had been one of the most significant figures for wizard equality. Not one of the loudest, that was certain, but he was  _significant_ . When talking about pureblood privilege, one quoted Vantas. One referred to his essays.

When he died, the list of suspects conveniently came down to two. Traces of magic not taught in most academies had lined his corpse like lines for a crochet piece, mockingly neat and smoking with vileness. Only two witches were known to study it: one held an important post in the Ministry of Magic and was the head of the most respected and powerful pureblood family of the era; the other was Rose Lalonde.

The moment she was arrested, sales of her books went through the roof. She and Dave had sections of the same size dedicated to each of them in Flourish and Blotts—one thirty-centimeter rectangle reserved for his moving JPEG artifact pop-up books, another for her incomprehensible novels. Although you’d be hard-pressed to find a wizard or witch over fourteen who hadn’t heard of them, not a lot of people had actually bothered to go through their stuff. That changed for Rose. Her rectangle blew up to five times its size.

Her work exploded through the mainstream. Her old fans dug up proof that she was sympathetic to Vantas’s cause by quoting her books; her anti-fans tried to convince everyone that she was an absolute pureblood supremacist by doing the same thing. Dave, by virtue of being the only family member she kept in touch with, was hounded for interviews.

\- _Did Ms. Lalonde ever show any disdain of Muggleborns in her day-to-day-life?_

_\- Are you serious? Is this even a question? Look, Rose isn’t the kind of person who looks down on people for shit like that._

_\- What is she like?_

_\- Creepy. Likes to use big words. Being around her… it’s like carrying around a hundred-pound library that really likes to talk to you in this annoying little lofty voice, like: Dave that’s not how you do this, Dave you’re supposed to charm that, Dave what are you doing my dress is on fire. You get my drift._

They didn’t. Mass hysteria persisted, the debate heated up, and Rose Lalonde became the most controversial person in recent history. The entire Order had given all they had, but the Ministry needed to arrest someone, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Peixes.

So in she went.

“Dave, I’m so _sorry_ ,” said Jade English, wrinkles deepening with sorrow. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “I should’ve seen it coming—I should’ve hid her, I—“

“Nah. If anyone should’ve stopped her from meddling with tentacles of grimdarkshit that the goddamn _Peixes matriarch_ made her signature, it was the dumbass who went to school with her.”

He lit a candle across them and drew in a breath. The last time he saw Rose light a yellow flame, he had been twelve.

* * *

There was never any doubt about it. When the news had reached him Dave had gone into headquarters expecting that he would have to make a case for getting Rose out of prison. He walked in to find Jade, Leijon and Nitram, eyebrows drawn down and foreheads lined with age and seriousness, discussing just that.

They had called Pyrope first, who earned the nickname Redglare in Gryffindor, as her lie-detector specs would glow red whenever anyone would tell even the smallest fib in her vicinity. (There was an amusing story about that, like the time someone said she couldn’t see because they kept lighting up in the middle of Yule Ball, or something—Dave didn’t remember.) Aletei Pyrope had the sort of mind and resolve you never expected to find outside of the pages of fiction; she possessed words and actions that cut through deceit like a freshly-sharpened blade. Yet she was only about as old as Dave was. “There’s only so much I can do,” she’d warned them. “I am nobody. Competence can only get you so far when you’re as green as I am.”

Xionic Captor they’d asked to extract information where he could from whatever sources he could find, even though his voice was hollow when it bothered to show itself. He’d sit in front of a painting of Vantas with the information he’d gleaned and bury his head in his hands; _where did I go wrong?_ And Vantas was always terribly silent until the painted mouth would say: _Nowhere, dumbass. You were brilliant. Sorry about all this._ Then Captor would trudge on but there were always little stains on his reports, once-wet things that dotted the lines between his neat letters.

Arteme Leijon refused to even look at the painting. One day she packed her bags and left. In the week that followed, eight members of the Peixes family died mysteriously.

It was a shitty time to be him. Dave felt entirely worthless. Jade, and even John, who up until the moment of Rose’s arrest had been really wishy-washy about everything and baked ‘upset pastries’ whenever someone brought back news of hate crimes, were around trying to speed things along because no matter how upstart they were, they were still _Peixes_ , and that mattered, in some places.

Redglare would crash at his place and tell him how things were going, but nothing she said ever meant anything to him. The words he waited for were always _Rose is out_ , and they did not leave her clever mouth for months and months. She’d get angry about this, sometimes. She told him, I got Mister this to do this and that should make the process of that and that go much faster, or I found that terrible lawbreaker Mindfang and _I really should arrest her_ but she can help, or Dave, you do know I cannot negotiate with Dementors.

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, always. She’d blow out his candles and turn on the lights. “Really, what is technology good for if you’re not going to use it? Perhaps when Rose comes back you could: a) teach her how to operate a light switch or b) hide all her candlesticks. If she continues to live like this she will ruin her eyes.”

He didn’t think about what would happen if Rose had been Kissed; didn’t think what would happen if she hadn’t been, and snapped just because she saw an empty husk in the cell across from her scratch at the wall and lick it clean, or heard screaming from her neighbor, or had too many nightmares without having someone to shake her in the morning. She was stronger than that and he _knew_ , but there were always things you objectively knew but could not stop fearing. Dave had never had irrational fears as a child. Not of heights, not of spiders, not of the dark. It turned out those fears were just running a little late.

He dreamed once, of her in a prison of thorns trying to fight off ghouls. He screamed her name but she didn’t know it. Chained to a mountain behind him, he watched her raise a graying hand to her face and turn it around. Like petals, her skin flaked off and pooled to the ground in a silvery heap.

“This was not how I intended to go out, Strider.”

“You _wanted_ to die?”

“Well, if I had to,” and she smiled, like it was simple, “I would’ve chosen to burn.”

It rained, and she disappeared with its falling, melting into the dawn above the horizon.

He woke. His throat was dry and his eyelids felt stuck to each other. There was a knocking on his door. When he looked, the peephole’s convex lens showed him a woman with white-blonde hair.

Calmly, as though all the time in the world would wait for her, she let him take her coat and handed him her scarf. The last time he saw her, she’d been taking Rose home after another disastrous reunion—the last Bro and Dave had ever attended—and it struck him how different she looked now. Perhaps it was because he used to see her through the simplistic eyes of childhood, which fit everything into the narrative built by a juvenile mind; she had been the tallest witch in the world back then, with hair spun from frost flowers and sharp-nailed, hard-knuckled hands. Now he saw her as she was: an old woman, perhaps more charismatic than most, with a certain air of control about her that was as bewitching as any mind-affecting spell, but a human being nonetheless. He now saw the tiredness in her gaze and the deliberate way she moved, how close her hands always were to the pocket where her wand sat.

“Hello, Dave,” she said, through dark lips too much like Rose’s.

After he let her in he made her some coffee; she refused it and asked for some tea. Rose left some of her favorite loose leaves in his kitchen cupboard. He brewed some for her mother and tried not to think about the way the scent used to fill the kitchen whenever Rose and Jade stayed over. Tried not to think about the mornings Rose must face now.

“I rather miss Rose.”

“Huh,” says Dave. “Didn’t think you were close.”

“We weren’t. But I suppose she chose that. I wouldn’t fault her for it.”

The silence stretched on.

“It’s not fitting, you know. No daughter of mine belongs in Azkaban.”

“Yeah, well. We’re trying. We’re doing all we can.”

“Tell me what you’re doing,” she said, and behind the opaque, light-hearted tone of her voice Dave saw it, the way she lowered her chin just so, the darkening of her irises. It was the way Rose looked when she’d planned seven moves ahead of the next one.

Suddenly Dave found himself back in one of the smaller rooms in Lalonde Manor, a cold fire burning in the hearth behind him and Rose as she leaned in, prompting him to explain his idea. Her hands were small, unmarked, as though youth was a protective glove; the firelight cast little lilac triangles in her eyes.

Rose’s mother waited. There was no light save for the soft glow of the moon outside the window.

Dave told her.

She smiled. “I wonder, would you mind _awfully_ involving me in these things?” she said, smiling. Dave raised an eyebrow, tried to remain expressionless. “In exchange, I will trust you with two of the Lalonde family’s youngest. The circumstances surrounding their births are complicated, and my family needs no further complications.”

Dave paused. A trade, then, the smoothing out of one wrinkle in exchange for the ironing of another—or a real act of affection and love. Whatever. It wasn’t his business. It didn’t matter as long as she helped.

“Sounds fine. So how do I contact you?”

She handed him a card.

He saw her out and handed her scarf and her coat back to her. She disappeared into the night. In the kitchen, the dishes were waiting. He turned the tap and felt the cold water burn his hands, started scrubbing away at the porcelain absent-mindedly. Rose had preferred odorless dishwashing liquid. The vapor of the tea remained; the ghost of a conversation was carried in the scent that surrounded him.

Standing in front of the counter, adding milk to her tea; early sunlight dusting pale gold on her face; lips upturned and eyes bright as she turned to face him.

“Good morning, Dave, don’t you think it’s too early to be looking like you just swallowed a jug full of pus?”

“Shit, you’re cheerful today. Any time now I’ll find out the name of the poor chump you’ve just murdered. It’ll be in the papers, I’ll bet. Can’t be any other reason for that grin.”

“Oh, of course not. They’d never catch me, you know. I’m only the most devious witch on the planet.”

It had been funny then. Something bitter welled up in his mouth and made its home there. Tap, tap, tap, went the second hand on the clock in the living room, counting down to Rose’s return.

* * *

He dreamed, also, of blasting a hole through Azkaban’s walls, and then bracing himself against a torrent of raging Dementors, finding Rose’s bony wrists, pulling them hard. Then they fell.

The prison was surrounded by the sea. Even the best swimmers succumbed to its waves, and Dave and Rose had never really learned. Funnily enough, under the surface, they both laughed. Bubbles floated up in quick succession from their mouths and burst; Dave dreamed of drowning.

* * *

(Here is how they got Rose Lalonde out of prison: Polyjuice Potion, and a dying cousin of her mother’s.

“How did you not figure that out?” Dave had said to Redglare. He didn’t yell but his voice shook much more than he thought it could, and even Redglare looked alarmed for a moment.

“It was unlawful!” was her argument. “I was getting through it in a way that, if someone asked us about it, we need not lie about more than we had to. Eventually Rose would be out and you would be happy, and we both know that she wouldn’t surrender to Dementors. And it would be much simpler in the long run.”

“We were going to help someone escape Azkaban; what part of that told you that we weren’t going to break any laws,” he said. “So what if there were ten or two or three to break; it’s not like we’re talking about someone’s fucking testicles here, Merlin, there’s fifteen of them, this is a terrible plan, we should ditch it and find one that doesn’t have crotch tumors—except that wasn’t what it was at all _._ English never said, ‘get her out clean and nice like a Muggle boy scout’, she said ‘get her the fuck out as quick as you can’. Notice the difference, Pyrope?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Ditto,” he said tiredly.

Back when she was a fresh graduate and he was still a fourth-year student she’d told him there were several fundamental flaws of the housing system: the first was that it assumed that humans could be boxed into four categories based on personality traits at the age of eleven; the second was that a child might have equally strong traits from more than one house, and she or he would have to choose between them; the third was that children would mold themselves according to their houses anyway, because they’d feel pressure to do so; and the fourth, and most important, was that people _changed._

“Always thought you were going to turn Ravenclaw, in the end,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. She knew the remark had nothing to do about the color of scarves or eagles or lions, and she had never really cared for house pride.

All the same. A jagged knife could cut as deep as a smooth one, if a bit more messily.

Redglare narrowed her eyes at him from behind her glasses and left without another word. Her footsteps echoed. When Dave was in his second year she had been in her sixth; she’d leaned down over him, filled in a line in his homework while slipping him a bottle of Firewhisky. That had been the start of their friendship. What this argument had been, he didn’t dare name. Dave stood there, alone, and waited for Rose to come back.

Here is how long it takes for Dave and Redglare to become friends again: a lifetime.)

* * *

Redglare’s way would’ve been better in the long run.

Rothbart Lalonde had wasted away in prison, still looking exactly like Rose. Dave had seen the picture himself: a ghost of Rose, lying lifeless and limp, with hollowed-out cheekbones and fleshless limbs. He kept it. It reminded him of the worst, always. But seeing Rose—the real Rose—walking towards him, a thin smile gracing her gaunt face, untied a knot deep inside his chest and allowed him to breathe a little more lightly than he had in a while.

“You do realize this means no one else can ever see me again, right? I hope you’ll send my manuscripts to the publisher anyway. Books published posthumously always have higher sales,” she had said at his house. Her thin-skinned fingers were wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate.

“Your priorities are pretty fucked up,” he said, as coolly as he could. The haunted look in her eyes, even when she’d tidied up her hair and changed into clean clothes, remained. But then she stood up as though there was more life in her than she’d possessed even when she was younger, taking long strides to close the distance between them.

Dave didn’t think. He let things go where Rose wanted them to go, felt her dry lips slide against his own. When she pulled away she stared up at him from underneath her blond eyelashes.

He murmured, “You know if we had kids they’d probably have three heads or five legs. We could start a freak show. Buy a tent; hire some guy with a huge voice; paint ‘The Marvelous Strider-Lalonde Traveling Circus’ on a banner. There’s a lot of money in that, I bet.”

“Oh, shut up, I don’t see myself suffering through pregnancy,” she said, laughing softly. He’d never heard her laugh like that in front of anyone else, he realized with a new kind of dizziness. “Besides, we’re purebloods. Incest quite literally runs in our blood.”

Her pupils were blown wide. Dave shrugged, made the kind of sound that he’d make when telling someone about his toast preferences or what color underwear he was wearing, in what he thought was a passable attempt at nonchalance. She wasn’t buying it. Rose pushed him up against the wall hungrily, and he didn’t even tell her to slow down, not even once.

 


	2. And More, It Cannot Die

The first line contained no  _Dear Dave,_ or even  _Mr. Strider._  There was only one person who would read this letter. The author had not signed her name either; only one person could’ve written it.

_The south of France is lovely. I took a dip in the water and a woman with the most beautifully painted mouth attempted to take me to bed. I almost let her, but then I remembered you and oh, the children! Life as a faithful woman is trying, but I manage. If only you could see me now. I have picked out the most darling lip color; it cost me a fortune. I might just invoice you. I haven’t decided on that. I should like to see this shade smeared all over your cheek and just below your chest._

_For Roxy: I will be sending an owl with some funny French seashells. Are they any different from the seashells we have back home? We should let little Roxy be the judge of that. I imagine the song she’ll hear when she raises one next to her ear would be different. Yes, the ocean that touches le Midi is nothing like the gray, storm-heavy, wave-torn sheet of brine we are so accustomed to. I think it should be obvious in the ridges of the shells. They are whole, smooth; we have seashells in the form of sand._

_For Dirk: What a fickle boy. I have acquired nothing less than five cursed objects for him. Nothing serious, of course, I can see you disapprovingly raising an eyebrow already. One of them will color his eyebrows purple. I think we both know he will take them apart before he lets a single bit of any curse affect him. I wonder if that part of him takes after you, me, or any of his real parents? (What am I saying? We_ are _his real parents. The bond of blood is not so thick that it cannot be broken by what brings us together.)_

_Yes, love, as always. Pass my love on to them. I leave them no messages because I’d like to say whatever it is want to say to them myself. As for you, I ask you to remain patient. I am content here. It's awfully nice of Redglare to assign me to murder someone while he is on vacation. We’ll meet again. I know you’re looking forward to it._

It was a cold, unforgiving morning, and Dave had shut his windows to the biting air. Fresh out of bed, forgoing a shower, he felt like sitting around and doing absolutely bum-ass nothing. It was a Sunday. The kids were sleeping in after yesterday’s film marathon. He had a cup of coffee in his left hand, dark and steaming, and sleep dusted his eyelids still. He folded the letter and placed it in a drawer that was almost always locked. The phone rang. Dave turned the silver key, made it disappear. He shuffled over to take the call.

Jade had said: “Dave, you need to get your arse down here  _right now_. It’s Rose. She’s—I think you need to see her.”

Dave put the coffee on the table so quickly some of it splashed out and burned his hand. A string of images exploded inside his head, each worse than the last. There was a buzzing motion-blur, after which he found himself in front of Jade’s house—the smallest one she owned, and the most heavily-guarded. As the world steadied around him, Dave realized that he’d Apparated, the magic in him and his subconscious apparently using a link he’d never been informed of. The building expanded and showed him one narrow green door with a gleaming brass knocker. Dave lifted and brought it down seven times, in quick succession.

“Who is it?”

“Dave,” he said.  _Open up, god fucking dammit, I need to see Rose_ , he didn’t say.

The door had opened a crack and out came Jade English, all six feet of her, drawn up to her full height and with a wand pointed at his chest. He was aware that the security questions were necessary, but each one seemed more inane than the last, shrinking in the face of an image of Rose, lifeless as Dave had once feared she’d be. When Jade allowed him to come in he walked briskly down the corridor, to the room with the black door. Rose could be—this could be the day—

She couldn’t be, Dave thought firmly, and pushed open the door.

Rose was lying on her back, face pale and shiny with sweat, blood blooming in the sheets underneath her, petal-like. Her eyes were closed. Her hand fell limp over the side the bed and sickening green glow snaked upwards from her wrist to her shoulder. Next to her, Dorosa Maryam appeared to be drawing a web of reddish light, while John was tapping a gash on her stomach with his wand, letting a golden glow fill it and seal it shut. Rose made no noise, only breathed erratically.

“Her cover was blown. We all want to fry the arse who did it, so I think you should get in line,” John said. These words did nothing to soothe him. “Don’t worry, Dave. She’ll be fine. We’ve got her. I’ve made some really good cake if she needs some later.”

“Sure she will,” he said.

Maryam set down whatever it was she’d been working on Rose’s body, and Dave saw Rose relax a little. She had a level, calming gaze, and green eyes as deep as a fabled lake.

She said, “Trust us and wait outside. You can talk to her later, when she’s well enough to do so.”

He left the room and faced Jade, whose expression was grim. Dave suddenly realized that he was still in his red pajamas. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, twiddling her fingers. It was funny how  _young_  Jade could look even with her wrinkles and her white hair.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. How many times did he have to say this? If there was one thing he resented Rose for, it was what she put Jade through sometimes. But then, that wasn’t fair of him at all. “You remember the moment where you chose the wackest career path in the universe? You probably don’t, because  _it wasn’t you who made that choice._ ”

She nodded and ran a hand through her silver hair. Dave followed her as she went into the kitchen. From the top shelf, she fetched a glass bottle filled with swirling blue-gold liquid that sparkled in the lamplight. Her free hand she used to grab two cube-shaped glasses, which she set down on the table. Her wand lay stationary there.

“Darius said we have got to try this. I don’t know why he gets us these things. He knows Dorosa and John don’t drink. He just wants to make me an alcoholic, you know, but that’s just not going to happen,” said Jade, smiling. Zahhak was out traveling about ten months out of twelve, and he always brought something back. “Share it with me; it’ll make you feel better. There are cigarettes in Redglare’s room, I think,” she said, then she leaned in to whisper conspiratorially: “I can steal them for you. She’ll never know. Not like she’s going to yell at  _me_  about it anyway.”

“Nah,” he said. He bit down a smile—that was a side effect of being around Jade—and poured some of Darius Zahhak’s stuff for them both. The heat was strong in his throat, but not harsh; the liquid itself was nutty and bittersweet, with a sudden burst of honey at the end.

Jade hummed appreciatively, with a sort of childish glee. Her eyes twinkled. The comfortable silence settled between them as they drank. Two hundred and seventy seconds ticked away, each one like a grain of sand, each one another of Rose’s shallow intakes of breath.

Dave told Jade, “I think I’ll quit my job.”

She stopped in mid-sip, her glass frozen, tipped in front of her lips. Jade set it down slowly and blinked at him.

“Right, now I know you’re exaggerating.”

“I can start a record store or something, or I can get by from the sales of my books. Rose needs a place to stay; fuck letting her live alone. Some asshole in a silver mask is gonna come knocking with his friends in tow and who knows what she’ll do? I’m not taking that chance.”

“She can defend herself, Dave,” said Jade levelly, “but I get it if you don’t want it to come to that. It’s not like I get to tell you what you should do, anyway.”

He exhaled. “Yeah.”

Heavy footsteps filled the space behind him. Dave turned to see John, hands still a little stained with blood.

“I can’t believe you’d have a nice mid-morning drink without me. That’s so  _rude_ ,” he said, grinning. “She’s awake, Dave. Dorosa went upstairs to sort some of her stuff out. If you two feel like it later, come out and I’ll cut some of yesterday’s cake. It’s carrot! Jade loved it. She’s got good taste.”

Dave nodded, got up and made his way to the room. He already knew she hadn’t asked for him; she never needed to.

“Congratulations on not dying,” he said, closing the door behind him and taking a seat next to the bed. She was leaning on a pile of pillows, still paler than a corpse. When she turned to face him, he could see beads of sweat forming on her forehead.

“Heaven  _was_  rather tempting,” said Rose, “but they had nothing good to drink.”

He took her hand and ran his fingers over her knuckles, felt the thin scars on her palms.

“I thought they’d show you the other place. Your heart is blacker than my Bro’s limited-edition galaxy smuppets. I checked.”

“Oh, they offered to give me the tour, but I could hear all the tortured screaming from Heaven and I told them I’d rather not spend eternity having to sleep with earplugs on.”

 _Merlin help me_ , Dave thought.

“My place is quiet. Nothing but the sound of birdsong and mating cockroaches in the morning. I could kill the neighbors if they argue, and I scared off all the teenage boys already by throwing tampons at them,” he said. “Or you could live here and get yelled at by paintings. Your choice.”

She looked up at him and raised one eyebrow.

“Smooth, Mr. Strider. But do you have anything good to drink?”

“I know a guy who can get me a full bar, cocktail glasses, jars of olives, the works,” he offered, and was this close to bringing her hand to his mouth _,_  “but if you’re not too fussy I’ve a few bottles of good mead and some goblets I stole from the Manor when we were fifteen.”

Rose smiled at him with bloodless lips.

“That’ll have to do,” she said.

* * *

Dave had been upstairs earlier to see the kids. They didn’t sleep as restfully as children ought to; that couldn’t be helped. Their chests rose and fell with deep, slow breaths. Dirk slept on the side, straight as an arrow, his blankets thrown to one side. Occasionally, he would twitch a little. It could be his eyelids, his left arm, or his feet. The movement was always tiny. Roxy was spread out all over the bed, limbs exploding out, so she looked like a five-point star. She snored softly into a pillow that muffled the sound. Dave closed the door on each room, stood alone in the safe silence. That had been four hours ago. Then Dave had gone downstairs to wait, anxiously, like a sailor’s wife as her husband faced the waves.

He’d bought a large red clock, a plastic imitation of a respectable grandfather clock, and placed it in the living room. It had loud hands and a bell that rang every hour. The seconds turned to minutes; each fifteen ticks Dave would take another sip of his drink and spend the next fifteen seconds swirling it around in his mouth, savoring the burnt-spice taste. He was in the middle of using magic to take the alcohol out of his bloodstream when Rose appeared before him, hair sticky with blood, hands drenched in the stuff. Patches of gleaming wet redness covered her skin. Dark smears of it were like islands on her light blue dress, stretched out from the neckline to the hem. Dave’s mouth went dry.

“It’s not mine,” Rose said quickly. “I expect you’ll hear about it in the morning. Awfully sweet of you to wait for me; I expected to find the house deserted and all my money gone.”

“Was hoping you wouldn’t come back. I’d inherit everything, then move on to the next pretty pureblood woman and do her in, too,” he said, but he was already guiding her to the bathroom. Chatter could wait for the morning.

She turned the tap and blocked the drain. Dave unzipped her dress. Slowly, he pulled it off, letting his hands linger on her clavicle, her hipbone, and the narrowest part of her waist. When she leaned against him, it was only slightly. He felt no new wounds—only the old scars, which were mapped out so firmly in his heart that when she was out of sight they called out to him like a home did to the man who took shelter in it. Rose lowered herself into the bath, and Dave left her to it.

Now, he could stop counting. The moment Rose came home it ceased to matter. What he feared most was that one day, she might not put an end to it. Any night now he could wait until seventy hours have passed and he’d only learn of whatever terrible thing had befallen her from the papers or from Redglare. That, or the Death Eaters would hide her so deep in their soil that no one would ever find her. It would be that quick, losing Rose, more abrupt than an earthquake. But he had no say in the matter. This was what she’d chosen; this was what he must learn to accept.

As someone who had chosen to become an Auror once, Dave understood how Rose could greet the danger with open arms, running headlong each night into a new fight against opponents more terrible than the last. Dueling, that was when you  _really_  felt the magic, all around you, bursting in like sparklers in your veins, exploding in every heartbeat. Redglare was going to make him do Rose’s job, Jade had told him. The task had originally been his. Rose had no prior battle training, even if she was a natural combatant. But she had heard about it first and put her foot down, refusing to even let Redglare and Jade near him, causing all manner of problems for them when they insisted. In the end they had relented and allowed her to be their dueling hand. The job was a good fit for her, they later learned.

She came out of the bathroom. Dave didn’t need to turn to know; her footsteps always had the same measured quality to them. The bathrobe she wore, a fluffy scarlet one Dave liked better than most of his other ones, pressed against his arm as she settled next to him on the sofa. With a wave of her wand Rose allowed two glittering clipboards to float down to their laps, a piece of parchment on each.

“Might as well get it over with,” he said.

Rose looked at him, her expression relaxed, as though she was looking at him for the sake of it. Like she wanted to memorize him and summon the image of him at will. He leaned in to kiss her. The tang of iron filled his nostrils, followed by the scent of ylang-ylang, and underneath it all, the smell of Rose, there when she was curled up sleeping, in the mornings and dawns when she was messy and undignified.

“I think,” says Rose, “we have some homework to do.”

Dave pulled away. Her cool hand lingered on the side of his neck.

The parchment remained blank even as Dave struggled to reach for a projection, any projection, of the future. Each time he tried to put something down, the image of it jumped to his mind and something like fear and sadness seized him, lumping in his throat and choking him. He wrote one sentence and looked at Rose, whose eyes were clear. Her hands were sure. He took a deep breath and let it wash over him, zooming out. It wasn’t exactly tranquility; more like running away into the less cowardly part of his soul. His quill became steady in its movement, the letters thick.

It couldn’t have been more than two hours—two clangs of their clock—when the sunlight began to stream in, casting shadows of Rose’s fingers across her piece of parchment. Her hair was dry and the bathrobe had slipped down her left shoulder so he could see the constellation of freckles on her skin.

“Show me yours,” she said quietly.

“Remember, plagiarism is a crime punishable by Strider law. Committing it means you have to eat whatever Dirk cooks up for a week,” he said, waving his piece of parchment in her face. She took it.

“Of course I’d steal from you. Your ideas are always coherent and sensible.” She gave her own over to him and raised the one she now held to get a good look at it. "Your handwriting is appalling."

"Ah, fuck you. It's the handwriting of a genius, that's what it is. Jegus, yours looks like it came fresh out of a printer. I even recognize this font. That's just sick." He read through Rose's parchment quickly. "What do we have here, hm, splitting all monetary wealth in two, yeah, your clothes and shoes to Roxy, some of your books to be shared by the both of them. Oh, you've left your more dubious books to Dirk, good job there, like he needs more encouragement on that end..."

"I wish we were better Quidditch players, we could leave them a Snitch, an enchanted Quaffle, anything.” Roxy was a Beater, which explained the letters Dave got every so often from Muggle parents who got upset about Roxy hitting great big balls at their children and landing them in the hospital wings. Dirk was a Chaser, a position which made him much more loveable in the other parents’ eyes. “Hm. I was always hopeless on a broom, but the team loved me. Rose Lalonde, the only Slytherin who never got caught Confunding the opposing team, and also the only non-team member who also got treated to Firewhisky by the captain. Lovely times.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t the one who got hexed by the prefects because a drunk Slytherin passed out in the common room and everyone thought you gave her the password. So much yapping in my ears for the next few weeks, I thought I was living in a Chihuahua pack. Was ready to renounce the homo sapiens lifestyle and start running around on all fours, being an annoyance to everyone except for heiresses with special Chihuahua handbags and too much hair serum.” He paused, then looked up. "You owe me a bottle of mead for that."

Rose smiled.

“For which one: getting hexed by the prefects, or contemplating living life like a small, noisy dog? I wasn’t responsible for the latter, and the former happened far too long ago. Best let bygones be bygones. Although, if you really want that mead, I suggest you ask either Jade or Pyrope to give me a raise."

Dave attempted to wipe ink from his nose and succeeded only in covering the middle of his face with a black smudge.

"Oh, sod off. Maybe I will, more money to the kids if you snuff it," he said, remembering how it was when Bro had died. Their relationship had been strange and a little strained, but there it was, a hollow cavern that didn’t so much carve itself out of Dave as crumble out of him. He could’ve inherited all the money in the world. It wouldn’t have made a difference. “I’m going to shower. You’re taking that to Redglare?”

“Yes. Oh, and: there’s no more hot water left.”

“Go die in a ditch,” he said, but went anyway. Rose’s bloodied dress was soaking in a bucket; he’d have to get rid of that before the kids woke up. True to her word, the shower was freezing. That was all right. That was another little sign, like the dress, that Rose was here. When he went back outside she was already in a shirt and a loose white skirt, a newspaper in her right hand, her wand in her left. A piece of toast was floating beside her, and a knife was spreading a thin layer of strawberry jam over it.

“They’re calling it a war now, apparently. How melodramatic,” said Rose, with her mother’s fluttering sigh.

“The media, right? You should’ve seen them while you were in prison. Bunch of screaming monkeys in a pit of hard-boiled shit, that was. Thank fuck it’s over.”

“I imagine it must’ve been a riot.”

“You’d think that.”

He took the paper from her. Delacroix was dead. So was Berell. No great loss to the world, as far as Dave was concerned.

“A Reducto to the head? That’s just bloody disgusting, Lalonde.”

“I was aiming,” she said loftily, “at the door next to him. I missed.”

“Jade won’t be happy.”

“So she won’t,” said Rose, like  _what can you do?_

She looked at him. He’d just accepted a teaching job at Hogwarts, as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. For a few months Rose would be in this house alone, or maybe she’d leave, take some time to chill in Bali, try not to kill something for a week. He hoped it was the latter.

“Dave,” she said. She sounded very quiet. “Try not to let any of your students get hurt. It’s a terrible time to be young.”

“Yeah.” Time was, the thought would never have crossed her mind. He got up. She followed. “You reckon you can promise not to do any weird shit while I’m not around to keep you in check?”

“Redglare would be displeased to lose the extra hand. Perhaps she’d make an exception for you; I can’t imagine her denying this wish, considering whom it comes from and whom it concerns. Although you know I’m perfectly capable of cleaning up after myself.”

“I know. It’s just—let’s not keep those possibilities around if we don’t have to, alright?”

She smiled a little, looking reminiscent. They had sat inside a cage for half a night for no reason at all. It was like drinking Firewhisky at thirteen, or making something explode in Potions: the sort of mistake one made and didn’t regret, but would not repeat.

“Funny. I was already thinking the same thing.”

* * *

Illumination came in the form of brief flashes of bright light, people dueling and fighting and killing and dying; Dave ran from one end of the hallway to another in the light of their battles. He wasn’t fighting anyone at the moment, and his wand was restless in his hand. He needed to be knocking a Death Eater down. Needed to be making  _something_  explode, needed to unleash some sort of energy into the air.

Then Rose burst into the space in front of him, body tense with the spirit of destruction. She was fighting three people at once, bless her, and when one came into view Dave threw a curse at him and severed his left arm. She didn’t look his way; only changed the way she fought so her flames came after his slashes, and by the time the minute was over all their opponents were down. Rose bent down a little, catching her breath. When she got up again she looked right at Dave.

Her cheeks were gray with soot but her eyes flashed pale in the darkness, and her hair was a messy cloud of silver around her, her arm sticky with dried blood. Dave ran towards her and, without pausing, pulled her close, kissed her. Rose responded with a fierce, naked hunger—her hands in his hair, on his shoulders, his neck, her teeth against his lips, her tongue forceful in his mouth. When she pulled back her lips were swollen and the lines on her face were illuminated by the flashes of a battle, somewhere. She lifted one hand to his face and traced his features, kissed him again, this time softly, and pushed his shades up. Rose let her fingers ghost over his neck and looked him in the eye.

“Dave,” she said, backing away from him, “it wasn’t that Heaven was lacking in good liquor or that Hell was too noisy for comfort; it was your absence. I won’t be wholly comfortable until that is remedied, but over the years, I’ve learned to be a more patient woman. You needn’t hurry.”

Then she pointed her wand at the space between them and pushed him backwards, summoning a wall of solid stone, and he was left with his fists banging on it, screaming her name.

There was a rush of terrible thoughts, of what the future would look like, stained at the edges with her presence that once was. Dave’s brain came back and kicked his ass a little. He knew where she was going and what she was planning. He always knew, and the map expanded, sprawling in his mind; he followed the trail. Dave ran.

Rose liked dramatic entrances and exits—it’ll be a tower, Dave thought, an explosion somewhere high up, and he took stock of the towers readily available. There were three, although one was now less of a tower and more of a pile of rubble, and another was much too far away to be worth it, and was kind of isolated besides. There was one on the east end of the place, though, busy with fights.

Funnily enough, when you were a well-known member of an anti-Death Eater organization the things tended to try to kill you like nothing else mattered, so Dave accumulated two opponents trying to curse the life out of him by the time he was climbing the staircase that led him up the tower. One nearly hit him with the Killing Curse. Fuck that shit, he thought, and rushed into the main room of the tower proper. Rose nearly roasted him with a curse that the Death Eater she was trying to kill dodged, but he leaped over him and reached her side.

“None of what I said was meant to be taken as an invitation,” Rose said tetchily.

“I thought you knew I liked crashing parties,” Dave replied as he dueled back-to-back with her. “It’s right up there with winning rap battles and acting out the Kama Sutra.”

“How could I forget?”

Bang, flash, another deadly curse dodged, another Death Eater thrown to the ceiling. They rotated like a unit.

“Rose. I’m fuckin’ ready for it, you know, the Big Beyond, meeting my maker, yadda yadda. You don’t have to cross that bridge all by yourself, you get? I’m pretty good at dealing with trolls.”

He’s never realized how true it was until he finally said it. Dave wasn’t afraid of dying. He had been, before, wide-eyed and younger, with so much in his hands to lose, but now he knew better. Leaving Dirk and Roxy behind was—well, Dave’s made his choice now. They’d be fine. He thought of the way Roxy threw a curse and the power surging around Dirk as he fought; the peace they possessed that he and Rose always lacked. They were made of stronger stuff than their guardians.

“You could live without me,” Rose said.

“Yeah. I’m cool and self-sufficient that way. But if you were me right now and I were you, would you be high-tailing your way out of here at max speed?”

She was almost  _playing_  with her opponents; she wanted to take them all out with her big finish, Dave understood, and covered her ass so she wouldn’t get killed before then. She said nothing while they continued to defend.

“Didn’t think so.”

“What I would do has nothing to do with what you should do. I thought the fact that I’m a little bit insane has been established a long time ago. Thank you for all the extra Death Eaters, really, but you’re needed elsewhere—“

A blast that pushed the two of them apart cut her off, and Dave held her gaze for as long as he could before he was forced to look at the Death Eaters again. The world seemed to slow down around him as he moved, and he did so faster, faster, until he saw everything blur at the edges.

He found himself back-to-back with her again. She offered no other arguments, perhaps finally realizing how futile they would be. This was the room and hour he would die in. This was the person he would die with. All things considered, Dave was feeling pretty good about his choices.

One last thing to do. He closed his eyes and thought of Dirk and Roxy, all grown up, with the future held tight in their hands. Then: them running around the house, barely old enough to talk; coming home for Christmas, loud as ever; graduating with matching grins even though Dirk tried hard to play it cool; fighting hand-in-hand, shielding a group of children from an attack.  _Sorry, kiddos,_  he thought, and hoped by some bit of ancient magic the apology would reach them. They deserved it. They deserved more.

“Right.  _Sonorus_ ,” he said, hand tight around Rose’s, moving in circles. He took in every single Death Eater around them—there were five in total still fighting. It would be nice to take out more, but they didn’t have the time. They had places to be, afterlives to conquer.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve reached the end of the ride. This is David of The Marvelous Strider-Lalonde Traveling Circus signing off. We don’t need you to tell us we’re core-of-the-earth-temperature fecal matter. We know it already,” he bellowed, relishing the echo, and paused for effect.

"Let's hear it for us," Rose added, screaming gleefully like she had never done in her life.

“Enjoy the fireworks, fuckers.”

A green light curled around him and Rose like a snake, like a fuse. Here was the fucking sun, with murder in her eyes and purpose running through her veins, a mind sharper than a dagger, a heart that tumbled and thumped with the same inexplicable rhythm as his.

“It’s been a pleasure,” Rose said, to him as much as to anyone else. Thank Merlin that’s the last thing I’ll ever hear, he thought, and in that split-moment he felt the threads of her voice wind around his soul. It was her. It has always been her.

Then: light, and an explosion of sound everywhere, a world of heat and pain.

And nothing.


End file.
